Is It Natural for Older Guys to Lust After Young Women?

In my office, Amber is telling me a familiar story. She’s come to talk about her autobiography paper for my women’s studies class, and she reads part of her rough draft aloud.

“I was 12, and this car pulled up alongside me as I was walking home from school … the driver looked a little older than my dad, at least 40. He leaned out, and I thought he was going to ask me for directions, but instead he asked me how old I was. When I told him, he laughed. ‘Damn, you got some big titties for such a little girl.’ He made this gross smacking sound with his lips, and sped away. I ran all the way home.”

Amber looks up at me. “I want to know,” she asks, “why do older men hit on younger women?” She’s 20 now, tall and graceful; she tells me that for the last eight years, older men have been approaching her. “It’s not just me,” she adds, “it happens to most of my friends, almost regardless of what they look like or what they’re wearing. It makes me feel like I can’t trust anyone, like all men want just one thing. Why can’t they chase women their own age?”

(snip)

Remarkably, the “family values” editors at America’s flagship conservative journal let this nonsense run, perhaps because they accepted what he was saying as gospel truth: 15- and 16-year-old girls are more sexually alluring to normal adult men than are women in their late 20s. But Derbyshire wasn’t telling us a truth about women’s beauty—he was telling us a truth about the way we’ve socialized male desire.

7. Oh yes, he even says later in the piece

that this isn't about shaming anyone for doing a double take at an attractive teenager. I think he does well to draw a firm line between such glances and outright leering... and between the true wrongness of this kind of thing with respect to teen girls, and the simply less-likely mutual attraction between early 20's women and older men (it does happen, but not as often as some would like to imagine).

6. i have been saying ALL of this for a couple years now.

literally, ALL of it. good to have confirmation on my thinking process. and i say this because as a young girl, i too had the older men thinking they were all that. being a waitress, it was dependent on my tip, my ability to eat. so as i smiled and allowed, i was thinking creep until i got in the backroom and was allowed to tell the fellow employees what a creep that man was....

why did that man drive up to the 12 yr old and say that? dominance. it is the same as rape just a very shallow level of it. to feel empowered and to humiliate that girl. nothing more.

why do older men oggle the young girl? same thing. you can feel it as the recipient, you know what the man is doing. and every man that feels it is his right, likes to pretend otherwise. but it is not easily hidden like they think it is. and an older woman wouldnt put up with their shit and they know it.

before, there were more men like the article speaks of, with the real man. today, my theory is, with the inundation of porn and easy accessibility of porn and the mainstreaming and normalizing porn, too many older men have learned to sexualize our young girls instead of seeing them are the article states men should see our young girls.

9. the men look like fools. they look like fools to the girls. they look like fools

to everyone who is watching. they think they are so cool, and they dont get how bad they present themselves to the world. i had my teenage son with me in a restaurant picking up some food. some old man was hitting on a young waitress. she is smiling, that smile... and the other guest at the table looking uncomfortable but with that smile. my son is watching it all. when we left he says, why? why do older men do this. they look so stupid. the girl has no interest in him and everyone is just looking at them.

i have seen so many old men do this. can you imagine an old woman behaving like this with a young man. the gasps... the WTF's